Quality Assurance

If your test automation team’s directive is to automate X amount of tests, and you have no strategy as to which tests they should focus on, you are wasting your time. Before you begin writing your first line of automation code, make sure you have a strategy in place. Otherwise, you will have a ton of ineffective tests to maintain. Don’t Choose a Random Goal How many times have you [...]

I’ve been in QA a little over a decade now, and there is so much to learn as the field constantly evolves. To stay current, I have to carve time to learn, read, and see how others are adapting to our changing world. With so much material available, let me point you to some of the people I like to keep up with. And since next month is Women’s History Month, let’s take a look at [...]

Paired programming brings two developers together to produce higher quality code compared to those same two engineers coding separately. Just as paired programming has someone writing code while another person reviews the code as it is being written, paired testing has someone doing the testing while another person takes notes, asks questions, and spots/reports bugs. I’ve personally found [...]

Even if you aren’t directly responsible for performance, it is important to consider it under the umbrella of quality. As a tester, how do you move forward and help drive performance quality (especially when you are new to this area, like me)? What are the ramifications of not considering performance within QA? Let’s take a look at what performance is, the questions QA can ask during [...]

I grew up watching shows like MAS*H, and Emergency!. Doctor and paramedic characters would perform triage of injuries and determine which ones were critical and which could wait. If you think about it, bugs in a feature are like injuries to your code, and when they are discovered, they too need to be triaged. Without triage, bug tickets can add time to your development process and even cause [...]

Do you have a manual QA team that needs training to become automation QA engineers, but you don’t have the budget? Many of us are facing this same obstacle in a time of scarce talent. If you are a QA manager looking to upgrade your team, or a QA analyst looking to make the career move into automation, here is a guide to free and cheap online classes that can help. Make Use of (Almost) Free [...]